Shivta

(Local Name: Subeita) District: Southern

Altitude: 350m/1,150ft

Situation and characteristics

The ancient city of Subeita, now known as Shivta, lies 55km/34mi southwest of Beersheba, on the south side of the road to the Egyptian frontier. Here can be seen the ruins, some of them astonishingly well preserved, of a Byzantine city of the fifth and sixth centuries, with three monastic churches, dwelling-houses, water cisterns and paved streets, which was still inhabited in Arab times.

History

Subeita, lying between Avdat and Nizzana, was built by Nabataeans in the first century B.C. An unfortified town, it was taken over by the Byzantines and so radically altered and rebuilt that the British archeologists who excavated the site in 1934 found no Nabataean but almost exclusively Byzantine remains.